Deployment of wireless communication devices continue to increase across a broad spectrum of applications, including specific or dedicated applications. Many wireless applications have static environments where a wireless device typically remains in a single environmental context during its use. For example, a wireless device might only communicate with a single access point during its deployment and thus require only a single wireless configuration. However, wireless devices can also be deployed in highly dynamic environments where the wireless device can move from one context to another, or where dynamic access points create new contexts for the wireless device. In dynamic environments, wireless devices might require many different wireless configurations during its deployment. Therefore, wireless devices require an ability to shift from one operating profile to another quickly, especially in environments where the wireless device could include many possible profiles.
Others have put forth some effort toward the control or configuration of communication equipment. For example, U.S. patent application publication 2010/0293404 to Diab titled “System and Method for Dynamic Energy Efficient Ethernet Control Policy Based on User or Device Profiles and Usage Parameters”, filed May 18, 2009, discusses that an Ethernet link configuration can be controlled via device-related energy efficient Ethernet profile information. Unfortunately Diab fails to provide insight into configuration of wireless profiles. U.S. patent application 2012/0079567 to Van De Groenendaal titled “Wireless Manager and Method for Configuring and Securing Wireless Access to a Network”, filed Dec. 7, 2011, makes further progress by describing associating a wireless device with an access zone based on a location. Still, Van De Groenendaal also lacks insight into how a device can figure out which of many profiles could be selected.
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Even though the above art is useful for their intended purposes, they do not address circumstances where a wireless device could have tens, hundreds, or thousands of operating profiles and must efficiently sort through available profiles and identify a desired profile to be used. Thus, there is still a need for wireless devices capable of selecting a way to traverse a list of available operating profiles.